[Libreoffice-ux-advise] [Bug 97991] Reducing the size of the Windows Installer

[bugzilla-daemon at bugs.documentfoundation.org]

https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=97991

--- Comment #9 from Michael Meeks <michael.meeks at collabora.com> ---
There are several goals here that are in tension with each other:

* reduce download size
     + I assume this is not a goal; since the help has significant size[1],
       and by bundling lots of help files in we will rapidly become larger
       than the existing download.
     + IMHO our ~static 200Mb download footprint is reasonably small.
      + I suspect we could even increase this;
        I'd say an upped 250Mb is reasonable myself.

* reduce update size ?
     + not an explicit goal thus far, but clearly after the initial download
       the size of the incremental updates is prolly by far more important
       than the download size itself. This is an area where TDF could invest
       in improving things for the vast majority of users.

* reduce install size
     + IMHO our ~1Gb install size is reasonably small too.
        + Office 2013 requires 3Gb:
        +
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee624351.aspx?f=255&MSPPError=-2147217396

* improve performance
     + there is some level of cost from having all languages installed,
       I don't think this has been characterized recently - but it might
       be interesting to do that again in eg. cachegrind to get a hard
       number of eg. startup cost with more langs installed.
          + this should have some technical fix of course.

* increased font bundling
     + seemingly we want to include more fonts for some locales
          + in general a bit of engineering work can usually save
            some space to free it up for more fonts without growing
            our download footprint, if we're indeed too worried
        about that.

* distribute on-line help in the package
     + this essentially requires cutting the package into several
       pieces as suggested in order to keep the size sensible, that:
       + increases our test burden
         - 5x builds to test instead of one.
       + somewhat increases our releng burden
         - 5x builds to push -> more B/W
             -> a relatively small effect though
         + download page simplification / complexity
         - this will need re-engineering / tweaking
         - will need to be different for Windows.
         - how reliably can we detect people's locales
           and map that to the "click here to download"
           so 99.9% don't mis-download the wrong thing ?
           If we have eg. 2% downloading the wrong thing
           this adds ~4Mb to our apparent download size.
       + some engineering to the packaging perl scripts
         - some man days of work; no need to move to Wix.
     + I guess we would want to have roughly 20 languages
       in each of say five piece.
     + against this:
      + would obsolete the on-line help for Windows users.
      + what %age of users actually use the on-line help ?
        Previous studies I've seen suggest a surprisingly
        small number; and clearly an even smaller number
        of them are off-line at the time.
          ie. what is the benefit ? =)
      + confusion wrt. "what is LibreOffice" - mine is
        not the same as yours etc. "yours does not have my
        language" etc.

* Anyway - all things are possible; I imagine if someone has
  done the engineering work already; and has a real proposal
  that might be more interesting.

    My general suggestion would be to optimize our size and
packaging instead; I imagine investing in reducing and compacting
and/or better arrangement in the MSI so that the compression works
better (it is IIRC per-file based not global so it can't see
commonality between eg pt_BR and pt if they are in different streams)
would be a better use of time. Other things like moving our clipart to
SVG from PNG might help too (it compresses better usually).

    And/or if we want to include more things, upping the target
file-size limit might be a good idea.

    Just my 2 cents.

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